Part 2

[Sidenote: Table Y.]

No liver diseases were admitted into the Canadian hospitals. And the brain and nervous diseases afforded 6·5 per cent. admissions, and 2 per cent. deaths for men, with 5·2 per cent. admissions and no deaths for women.

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Results.

These are the statistical results of this inquiry. To the extent to which the data are imperfect, the results are of course unreliable. The numbers are often much smaller than are required for such purposes. I have used them because the best obtainable, even with the assistance of the colonial governments; and the first lesson they teach is the necessity for assimilating the colonial registration and vital statistics to those at home. But, with all their defects, when these statistics are examined, they bring clearly into light certain great general facts.

As regards the schools, they show us that the educational idea in the colonies is just as deficient as it is at home, and that it is attended with worse physical consequences.

No account appears to be taken of the past history of the races on whom it is desired to confer the inestimable blessings of Christian civilization. Our teachers go among them just as they would into English villages. They collect the children who, together with their ancestors, have spent most of their existence in active out-door habits, into all classes of structures, good, bad, and indifferent, apparently without regard to the effect of local conditions on their health. In all probability the children are set together as close as they are placed in one of our Home “Model Schools,” without any reference to children’s epidemics or other fevers. This is not done without great risk, even with children of English birth. But to do this with children taken from their open air habits in uncivilized or semi-civilized communities is to incur the immediate danger of losing the most hopeful pupils by diseases, which, under a more rational system, might in all probability be avoided.

The education appears to be confined simply to head-work, and no provision is made for sustaining the health by physical training, while it is in danger of exhaustion by a cerebral stimulus, perhaps applied for the first time in the history of the family from which the child has sprung. It is true that cerebral disease forms only a small part of the school mortality; but the diseases from which the mortality proceeds in the tropical schools are {14} the result of overcrowding, defective ventilation, and other local sanitary evils, all of which are augmented by sedentary occupation.

The remedy for this is obviously to improve the school-houses, to give more attention to space, to ventilation, and to the locality where the school is placed, and above all to make physical training an essential and important part of the school system, never forgetting that the habits of generations cannot be suddenly broken through without danger to health and life.

In as far as concerns the effect of the schools on the disappearance of native races, the returns contain no appreciable evidence. Education, if properly conducted, together with the improved personal, physical, and moral habits consequent on it, ought everywhere to be conservative and not destructive; but to be so it should be conducted, as already stated, with a full knowledge of the physiological effects of altered habits and the influence of these on health.

The hospital returns, so far as they can be relied on, show in the tropical colonies a large mortality from diseases arising from bad drainage, bad water, imperfect agriculture, want of cleanliness, and from other bad habits. Bad, overcrowded, unventilated dwellings must also in these colonies, as at home, bear their proportion of the blame. Thus mortality arising from mitigable or preventible causes of an external nature occasions in all the colonies by far the greatest part of the death rate in hospitals. Incivilization with its inherent diseases, when brought into contact with civilization without adopting specific precautions for preserving health, will always carry with it a large increase of mortality on account of the greater susceptibility of its subjects to those causes of disease which can to a certain extent be endured without as great a risk by civilized communities born among them.

The hospital returns throw little light on the causes of the disappearance of native races, unless these are to be found in the great prevalence of tubercular and chest diseases in certain of the colonies. This is especially remarkable in the returns from Australia, Kaffraria, and Canada. But why this class of affections should be so much more prevalent in the temperate than in the tropical colonies could only be ascertained by careful local inquiry. One thing is certain that, in those colonies from which complaints of the disappearance of native races have come, {15} tubercular and chest diseases appear to occasion the largest amount of hospital mortality.

The discovery of the causes of this must be referred back to the colonies. Anything which exhausts the constitution; above all things, foul air during sleep, will engender these diseases. Open locality, healthy winds, active daily occupation, are by themselves no safeguards, if the nights be spent in unventilated cabins. The Alpine climates of Europe are known to be the most free of any climates from this tribe of diseases. But even on their healthy mountain slopes scrofula in all its forms prevails among the peasants, engaged during summer on the high pastures, when they pass their nights in the close unhealthy chalets there.

It is possible that a tubercular taint so engendered may be the cause of the whole evil, and it is to this point that the inquiry has brought us.

* * * * *

Appended to the school and hospital returns from each colony, there are very interesting notes, giving generally the impression of the reporters on the nature and causes of disease among the aboriginal population. These notes, the chief portions of which I have appended, confirm the statistical evidence; but they afford little additional light on the causation.

The decaying races are chiefly in Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and perhaps in certain parts of South Africa. They appear to consist chiefly of tribes which have never been civilized enough or had force of character enough to form fixed settlements or to build towns. Such tribes have few fixed habits or none. But the papers show that they are naturally, in their uncivilized condition, possessed of far stronger stamina, and that they resist the effects of frightful wounds and injuries far better than civilized men. This latter fact tells strongly against any natural proclivity to diseased action. But we nevertheless see that when they come in contact with civilized men, and are, as a necessary consequence, obliged to conform themselves to a certain extent to the vices and customs of their _civilized_ (_!_) neighbours, they perish from disease.

[Sidenote: Appendix II., pp. 62–3.]

The evidence contained in these notes unfortunately proves that the pioneers of British civilization are not always the best of the British people. Many of them, it is to be feared, leave their own country, stained with vice and vicious habits, ready for any act of oppression, ready {16} to take any advantage of the simplicity of the poor aborigines. Such people have introduced everywhere the use of intoxicating drinks, together with the diseases as well as the vices of their own depraved standard of civilization. Where the races are found most rapidly decaying, there the married women are found living in a state of prostitution and exposed to its diseases. And we know where such is the case, decline and extinction are inevitable.

This appears to be a main cause of the falling off in births; while the other evil habits introduced by Europeans destroy the stamina of the adult population and raise its rate of mortality. With the facts before us, imperfect as they are, we need feel no surprise at the gradual extinction of these unhappy races. But we should draw from them an argument for doing all that can be done to lessen these evils, and to remove, as far as practicable, any causes of disease and death which it may be in our power to remove.

Complaint of such things, in some form or other, runs through the whole of the evidence regarding these aboriginal populations, who appear to be far more susceptible of the operation of causes of disease arising out of imperfect civilization, than are civilized† men; how much more so must they be to such dreadful causes as those indicated above!

† Meaning by “civilized,” men who can live together in a city or village without cutting each other’s throats.

There is a strong presumption that, if aboriginal races are left undisturbed in their own country to follow their own customs and even their own vices, they will continue to exist as they have hitherto done, in a slowly increasing or stationary condition. But there is no reason to doubt the evidence contained in these papers that certain races require very little disturbance in their primeval habits to pass into a state of decline.

The great question at issue is, how this is to be arrested.

The facts appear to point to such remedial measures as the following:―

1. That provision of land should be made for the exclusive use of the existing tribes; but this, by itself, would be simply preserving their barbarism for the sake of preserving their lives. And the question naturally occurs whether Moravian settlements or settlements conducted on entirely similar principles, under whatever Christian {17} denomination, might not be introduced for the purpose of wisely and gradually winning the people to higher and better habits.

2. A good government which really understood its responsibilities would put down with any force requisite that most accursed of all British habits, the sale of intoxicating drinks to those who never knew them before. On the heads of these traffickers rests the blood of thousands of their fellow men.

3. Although a large proportion of children have died while under school instruction, there is no proof that education, if properly conducted, tends to extinguish races. And it _is_ possible that by educating outcast native children, these tribes, with whatever mental constitution endowed, may be spared to contribute their quota to human knowledge and advancement.

4. The school diseases, however, indicate that education should be conducted in a very different manner from what it is in England. Physiology would teach us that it is not safe to take the child of uncivilized parents, and to submit it all at once to the restraints of civilization. What is wanted is a careful study of what can and what cannot be done with safety. Time would seem to be a great element in the education of these children. There should be as little interference as possible with their born habits and customs. And that interference should take place gradually and wisely. The probability is that if children could leave school in health, with sufficient training to enable them to enter the pale of civilization, their children would be the more able to bear the required development of the mental faculties. In any case, physical training, and a large amount of out-door work, are essentially necessary to success.

5. We all know how difficult it is to preserve health among dense populations in our houses at home. We may hence infer how much more difficult it is to draw together numbers of uncivilized or partially civilized people, within the same boundary, or under the same roof, without great risk to health and life. Bring a healthy family from the open country into a narrow crowded London alley, and the little ones will die, the elder ones will be sick for, perhaps, the first time of their lives, and the parents will fall into confirmed ill health, to say the least of it.

Our home experience hence teaches us the extreme importance of favourable sanitary conditions, whenever an {18} attempt is made to bring the uncivilized within the pale of civilization.

Every society which has been formed has had to sacrifice large proportions of its earlier generations to the new conditions of life arising out of the mere fact of change. Only by the greatest care and by the adoption of every requisite improvement can London itself bear the rapid increase of its population without danger from pestilence.

This destroying principle is now at work in the colonies where races are decaying. And its results can only be diminished by assimilating the new conditions, involved in the change, as nearly as possible, so far as healthiness is concerned, to the open air activity to which the people have been for generations accustomed.

These are the results of this inquiry. Defective in many particulars though they be, they are still sufficient to prove that, on the local authorities of the colonies, there rests a responsibility in the face of public opinion in Europe, of the very gravest kind. It is a matter for state interference. It is impossible to stand by, while races are disappearing, of whom it can be said that the “Australian is the finest model of the human proportions in muscular development,” that his “head might compare with an antique bust of a philosopher,” that his “perceptive faculties are peculiarly acute,” that he is an “apt learner,” and “possesses the most intense desire to imitate his more civilized brethren in almost every thing;” that the Australian aborigines are “possessed of mental power on a par with their brethren of the other races of man; that they are perhaps superior to the Negro and some of the more inferior divisions of the great human family;” that they have “keen perceptive faculties, with a considerable deficiency in their reflective faculties, and a certain want of steadiness of purpose in their characters which appears the great obstacle to be overcome in reclaiming them and bringing them within the pale of civilization and Christianity.”

These statements are from a report on the subject, made by a select committee of the Legislative Council of Victoria in 1858–9. In this report occurs the following passage, with which I conclude on account of its authority, appealing from its facts to the better feeling of the colonies, with the hope that the time is not far off when such a stigma as it affixes to the empire may be wiped away.

“The great and almost unprecedented reduction in the {19} number of the Aborigines is to be attributed to the general occupation of the country by the white population; to vices acquired by contact with a civilized race, more particularly the indulgence in ardent spirits; and hunger, in consequence of the scarcity of game since the settlement of the colony; and, also in some cases, to cruelty and ill-treatment. The great cause, however, is apparently the inveterate propensity of the race to excessive indulgence in spirits, which it seems utterly impossible to eradicate. This vice is not only fatal, but leads to other causes which tend to shorten life.

“Mr. Thomas, the guardian of Aborigines, states in evidence, that one morning he found five drunken blacks lying buried in the mud at the Merri Creek, which being followed by pulmonary attack, death, as is invariably the case, ensued. It may be remarked, that consumption forms a fruitful cause of mortality amongst them, in addition to the other causes enumerated.

“It would appear that they have materially degenerated since the advent of the whites, as Mr. Thomas has said ‘the young die two to one in proportion to the old; I have some old people yet.’ The rapid settlement necessary upon the country being occupied by flocks and herds was more unfavourable to the Aborigines than if it had only been gradually taken up for agricultural purposes.

“Your Committee are of opinion that great injustice has been perpetrated upon the Aborigines—that, when the Government of the colony found it necessary to take from them their hunting grounds and their means of living, proper provision should have been made for them. Had they been a strong race, like the New Zealanders, they would have forced the new occupiers of their country to provide for them; but being weak and ignorant, even for savages, they have been treated with almost utter neglect.

“With the exception of the Protectorate, which was an emanation of the Imperial Government, and which seemed to have been only partially successful, little or nothing has been done for the black denizens of the country.”

Every colony where the native races are declining could furnish some such report as this. The injustice has been a common one, and so should be the remedy. {20}

APPENDIX I.

TABLES showing the MORTALITY and CAUSES of MORTALITY among ABORIGINES in COLONIAL SCHOOLS and COLONIAL HOSPITALS.

TABLE A.―ATTENDANCE and MORTALITY at COLONIAL NATIVE SCHOOLS.